Evidence map›Paper›PMID 29899161›Full record

ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2018

How ants move: individual and collective scaling properties.

Riccardo Gallotti, Dante R Chialvo

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
6citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

6 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Bridge, Reverse Bridge, and Their Control.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025
    Article
  2. Article
  3. Beehive scale-free emergent dynamics.Scientific reports · 2024
    Article
  4. Article
  5. Article
  6. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

2 authors.

Riccardo GallottiInstituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos (IFISC), CSIC-UIB, Campus UIB, 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
Dante R ChialvoCenter for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences (CEMSC), Universidad Nacional de San Martín, 25 de Mayo 1169, San Martín, (1650), Buenos Aires, Argentina dchialvo@conicet.gov.ar.ORCID 0000-0002-1038-3637

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

The motion of social insects is often used as a paradigmatic example of complex adaptive dynamics arising from decentralized individual behaviour. In this paper, we revisit the topic of the ruling laws behind the burst of activity in ants. The analysis, done over previously reported data, reconsiders the causation arrows, proposed at individual level, not finding any link between the duration of the ants' activity and their moving speed. Secondly, synthetic trajectories created from steps of different ants demonstrate that a Markov process can explain the previously reported speed shape profile. Finally, we show that as more ants enter the nest, the faster they move, which implies a collective property. Overall, these results provide a mechanistic explanation for the reported behavioural laws, and suggest us a formal way to further study the collective properties in these scenarios.

Indexed as

Models, BiologicalSocial BehaviorAnimalsAntsBehavior, AnimalLocomotionantsdecision-makingmovementnull modelsocial systemsuniversality

Identifiers

PMID29899161
PMCPMC6030638

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.